News

Funding opportunity for researchers: The NeCTAR Project

21 February 2011

The National eResearch Collaboration and Tools (NeCTAR) project is a $47m SuperScience initiative funded over four years. Funding is available for the development and delivery of a range of eResearch services focused on collaboration.

A portion of NeCTAR project funding is available to research groups to develop collaborative eResearch tools and services. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Intersect are looking to promote research groups and are looking to identify projects to which they could provide both engineering services and in-kind support. The intention is to work closely with researchers and NeCTAR to ensure a high level of quality, and potential success, in the projects proposed to NeCTAR.

NeCTAR is looking for projects that develop tools or services that:

enhance their capabilities from a remote access, real‐time interaction, or workflow perspective;

enhance their support for collaborative work; or

increase their functionality based on real‐time and back‐end access to other tools and services.

NeCTAR is also interested in fostering the development of collaborative communities that utilise distributed research resources (instruments, data & computation). It is expected that NeCTAR will favour projects that develop tools, or services, for broad research communities, in particular those involved in extensive collaboration.

The current timeline for this NeCTAR programme is outlined below:

February 2011: draft plan released for comment

March 2011: responses to draft plan due

End of March 2011: Project Board approves Final Project Plan before submission to DIISR by March 31

End April 2011: final plan released

We expect the initial call for project proposals soon after this as NeCTAR are looking for "early wins".

You can find more information about NeCTAR and its programmes on their website at www.nectar.org.au